ICM • THE INSTITUTE FOR COMPARATIVE MODERNITIES

RETHINKING COSMOPOLITANISM

ICM VIDEO ARCHIVE

CONFERENCE 2012 (FALL)

ABOUT THE ICM

he Institute for Comparative Modernities (ICM) addresses a key problem in the study of modern culture and society: the transnational history of modernity and its global scope. A broad range of scholarship over the last few decades has contested and complicated the two primary dimensions of the received narrative of modernity: that it arose strictly within the confines of Europe; and that its extension outside Europe was a matter of simple diffusion and imitation. What is emerging instead is an account of modernity as a global process in which deep and multifarious interconnections have created complementary cultural formations.

The Institute is dedicated to the study of modernity in such a transnational and comparative perspective. Its primary emphasis will fall on neglected or under-studied articulations of modernity outside of the historically constituted hegemonic spaces of Europe and the United States, but it will also give serious attention to conflicts and complexities within the West. Inadequate understandings of the complex history of modernity have led to simplistic and untenable positions that unknowingly repeat colonialism’s ideological juxtapositions of “us” and “them,” with modernity (and all the positive connotations of historical progress that accrue to the term) all on one side and inscrutable backwardness all on the other. This results in ghettoized scholarship that is damaging to all.

The standard equation of modernity with the West needs to be problematized and opened up to comparative examination. The Institute hopes to galvanize work in this direction by encouraging cross-disciplinary collaborative research that advances a genuinely global analysis of modernity that is also empirically faithful to geographical and historical specificity. By bringing attention to less frequently studied aesthetic and social practices from non-Western and immigrant communities, the Institute hopes to correct accounts of modernity as primarily Western in origin and dynamics.
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The Institute for Comparative Modernities
PHONE: 607.255.8073 • FAX: 607.254.7244
EMAIL: mek226@cornell.edu

SPRING 2013 EVENTS

Wednesday 3/6, 4:45 pm. Saree Makdisi
(Professor, English, University of California, Los Angeles). Lecture Series.
"Making England Western."
Lecture: Wednesday 3/6, 4:45 – 6:15 pm, Kaufmann Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall
Seminar: Thursday 3/7, 10:00 am – 12:00 pm, Toboggan Lodge, 38 Forest Home Drive

more
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Tuesday 4/2, 4:45 pm. Leslie A. Adelson
(Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of German Studies; Director of the Institute for German Cultural Studies, Cornell University). Lecture Series. "Horizons of Hope in Times of Despair:
Alexander Kluge's Cosmic and Global Miniatures for the 21st Century,
A Literary Perspective"
4:45 – 6:15 pm, Kaufmann Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall
more
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Wednesday 4/17, 4:45 pm. Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im
(Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law, Emory Law; Associated Professor, College of Arts and Sciences; Senior Faculty Fellow, Center for the Study of Law and Religion; Senior Fellow, Center for Ethics, Emory University).
Lecture
Islam and the Secular State
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
4:45 – 6:15 pm
Kaufmann Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall
Seminar
Incremental Success:
African Constitutionalism and Islam
Thursday, April 18, 2013
12:00 pm – 2:00 pm
Room 390, Myron Taylor Hall
more

ARTIST/SCHOLARS IN RESIDENCE

residence

PROJECTS OF THE INSTITUTE

2012-2013 GRANT RECIPIENTS
Graduate reading groups

2011-12 GRANT RECIPIENTS
Graduate reading groups

2010-11 GRANT RECIPIENTS
Graduate reading groups

2009-10 GRANT RECIPIENTS
Graduate reading groups

ICM NEWSLETTER #1 - SPRING 2009

ICM NEWSLETTER #2 - FALL 2010

ICM NEWSLETTER #3 - SPRING 2012

ICM NEWSLETTER #4 - FALL 2012

HIGHLIGHTS